Addressing escorting by behavior combining using multiple differential drive robots

Abstract

Robot escorting is a challenging task that can be applied to protect a target entity, capturing and to manage leader-follower formations. A linear combination of minimum distance maintenance and area coverage as an obstacle avoidance procedure was shown as an effective tool to escort with a simulated omnidirectional robot, which can deal easily with the constantly changing outputs generated by this method. In this paper, such approach is applied on differential drive robots to identify particularities of dealing with nonholonomic constraints. Two approaches of inter-robot distancing were tested and a perpendicular circling behavior was added. Experiments were performed using the V-REP simulator.